On Friday morning, Steve applied a fix to our test environment; by day’s end, Margie had agreed it should be moved to production. Steve did so after we went home for the weekend.
While this feels like a minor step in a long process, our web application is now fully functional. For the first time. That’s a Major Milestone. Margie will need to run some tests on the production system on Monday, but we’re finally in a position to tell the press office that they can announce this product.
In real life, we’ve already registered about 1,000 users; they’ve reported shortcomings but most have found a partially functional application to be useful. One of this week’s projects will be to notify the current user base that we think everything now works properly. Another will be to begin adding the thousand more users who’ve applied for access; that will take a few weeks. A final need is to move support for all those folks from Margie’s phone to the unit’s staff, a change we’ve been working on for several weeks. With mixed success.
Margie’s been shepherding the testing since February. She did OK, but there’s considerable room for improvement. She really doesn’t understand the logic of a testing process, yet, and hasn’t recognized that app development is as much a negotiation process as a goal setting endeavor. But she’s got this under her belt, and she’ll be more valuable to us for that experience.
We’re scheduled to begin discussing the design for Phase 2 in a couple weeks, when the (back end) vendor’s PM visits us for a followup. We have a list, she has a list, the IT staff has a list. I’ve got a sketchy proposal for a screen sequence change which needs to be worked out in detail. This stuff never ends.